Sysadmin Toolbox Top Ten

Linux.com is running a user writeup of several handy tools by an up-and-coming Linux user. It is always interesting to see how newer users are approaching system customization. What have some of the more seasoned Linux power-users and sys admins put in their "toolbox top 10", and why?

aterm?

[the_greywolf]

i only use rxvt-unicode. it's the only thing that will properly display the unicode text in the filenames of my Japanese music collection. :)

also, rxvt has another cool feature. aside from its shockingly minimalistic memory usage, run urxvtd and then urxvtc for every term you need open and it uses even less memory. what could possibly be better than that?

ren-regexp

[Michael.Forman]

My absolute must-have tool is a perl script I wrote to rename files using a series of regular expressions. Because it's implemented in perl, the command-line regular expressions can be just as complex as a perl regular expressions. I use it as much as or more than as I use "mv" to rename files.

If it sounds interesting, you can find it here [michael-forman.com].

Michael. [michael-forman.com]

Re:Torsmo is dead

[advocate_one]

did this on breezy 5.10,

Debian/Ubuntu

1. $ sudo apt-get install conky
2. $ zcat /usr/share/doc/conky/examples/conkyrc.sample.gz > ~/.conkyrc
3. try running conky by typing "conky"! enjoy!

got this...

xxxxx@yyyyyyyy:~$ conky
Conky: Xft not enabled
Segmentation fault

Re:My Top Ten

[rcpitt]

Add to this to round out to 10:

• xload

• xosview

and for all the EXIM systems (Sendmail? bah - Qmail - double bah):

• eximon

In no particular order:

[commonchaos]

• emacs
• grep
• perl
• sed
• svn
• xml [sourceforge.net] (manipulate XML from the command line)
• tar
• ssh (this one is fun: "ssh server tar -cf - directory | tar -xv")
• for (built-in bash command, one-line scripts from the command line are very useful)
• lsof (what processes have open network ports? why can't I unmount that disk?)
• wget
• ping
• telnet (test SMTP, HTTP, etc servers by hand)
• nmap

See also: Commonly used commands [kegel.com]

Re:ISO's

[pla]

You're right - it's preposterous to think a sysadmin would want to download distro ISO's quickly.

I see that argument a lot, but y'know, I can download an ISO of any major distro via plain ol' FTP or HTTP as fast as my cablemodem will let me. What exactly would I gain by using P2P, other than yet another open port on my machine just waiting for someone to find an exploit?

Though, don't take this as an anti-P2P stance... P2P has its uses, and more efficient (for the server, not for any particular recipient) distribution of large files comes in pretty high on that list. But on this list, of the top 10 sysadmin tools - It doesn't come in at all. It duplicates funcationality (if via a slightly different mechanism) already present on a stock Linux box.

Multitail!

[anonieuweling]

Why wasn't multitail [vanheusden.com] mentioned? MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such.

Re:Transmission?

[natet]

Ok, first, where'd you learn math? The guy says he is 17, and has used Linux since he was 11. Where I come from, that's 6 years, not 3. Second, he states in the first paragraph that is is more of a desktop enhancing toolkit rather than a sysadmin toolkit. The most you could rant about there is that he should have named the article more appropriately. Also, bittorrent is getting to be a useful sysadmin tool. It is valid method for getting ISO's of your distro of choice. And, although a client isn't necessary for this, tools like Systemimager are starting to use the torrent protocol for distributing images in a cluster install.

Re:Top 10?

[Mateito]

Leatherman supertool.

Yeah, its hardware, but given that plenty of things go wrong with hardware, its a great thing to have.

I used to carry it in my pocket, but that's now illegal in Aus without "good reason". Trying to explain to a street-cop that i need it to pull open servers, remove stuck ribbon cables and strips oxidized power cables is not worth the headache.

Re:My Top Ten

[David_W]

Was there a time in Unix when ls didn't exist?

According to the FreeBSD man page for ls, "An ls command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX." So I think it's been around pretty much from the beginning.

Re:My Top Ten

[sootman]

Last time this topic came up, [slashdot.org] I put out the idea of making a one-line script to make your own top ten list [slashdot.org], and some other slashdotters chimed in to perfect it.

cat .bash_history | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -10

Results from my home box:
98 cd
96 ls
57 pico
40 curl
17 sudo
15 locate
14 cat
13 mkdir
12 ps
11 du

The only reason 'ssh' isn't on there is because I have short scripts for each server I ssh to (like '~/bin/sshweb') that save time in general and, as a bonus, they color-code the Terminal window. [newbox.org] So 'sshweb' connects me to my production web server and makes the window red so I know to be extra-careful.

Re:My Top Ten

[nautical9]

Was there a time in Unix when ls didn't exist?

According to the FreeBSD man page for ls, "An ls command appeared in Version 1 AT&T UNIX." So I think it's been around pretty much from the beginning.

echo * actually came in quite handy once. I meant to type:

# rm -rf /home/user/tmp

but what came out was:

# rm -rf / home/user/tmp

I caught my mistake a few seconds later, but not after rm happily removed my entire /lib directory. It's a really good way to learn about shared libraries on unix!

(hint: ls is dynamically linked to files in /lib. No more /lib, no more ls, and about a hundred other rather handy commands. But echo still works!)

Probably a good example of why running commands as root is generally not a good idea...